Does anyone know if it's possible to do the above with itunes? What I would ideally like is to encode **between 32 and 320 kbps**. (This is possible using CDex, for instance and, according to bleep.com, that's the settings they use for their music). It says on the iTunes settings page that when VBR is enabled, the bit rate setting is used to set the _minimum_ bit rate. I assumed that if I had quality set to "Highest", and set the bit rate to 32 kbps, I would get the desired result. Not so. It encodes at a very low average bit rate, in mono, and with half the normal sample rate! Am I just doing something wrong, or is iTunes unable to do what I want it to do. (Note: the only reason I want to use iTunes to rip at all is that it's good at handling tags/CDDB. All the individual artists are set for each track in a compilation, rather than labeling every track as "Various Artists", and putting the actual artist in with the track name. This seems to be what CDex, EAC, CD-DA, etc. all do.)
Don't use iTunes to encode to MP3. EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is the best ripper there is. It is used by all the top audio phreaks. It checks every sector of the cd twice so no errors occur meaning the resulting files sound near identical to the original cd. As for the tagging problem. Use Tag & Rename which will connect to the CDDB and tag the files the way you want.
Thanks. I'll check out Tag & Rename. By the way, using EAC with Lame, the highest *VBR* bitrate available is something like 192kbps. Why is there no 320kbps VBR option? Is it that this value represents the *minimum* encoding bitrate? If so, what's the maximum? Cheers
I think 256 VBR is the maximum you can get. But each frame of audio will still fluctuate and there will be some frames that hit 320. It all depends on how much compression is needed.
